Aegean Airlines

Aegean Airlines is Greece's main carrier and its Star Alliance member, flying from Athens across the islands, Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. The operation is built entirely on the A320 family, ceo and neo, in a fleet young enough that a neo is now a common draw on the trunk routes.

For seat pickers there is one fact that outranks the rest: every published Aegean cabin is a single class. The airline sells business fares, and they are real fares with a curtain and a blocked middle seat, but the seat under you is the same three-by-three economy hardware from the first row to the last. Once you know that, the whole map reads differently.

The published layouts cover the A320 and A320neo, two near-identical A321s and the A321neo, the largest cabin in the fleet. The A321s are the fleet's long cabins, with banks of exit doors breaking the rows into sections and creating the only places with meaningfully more legroom.

The neos are the quieter, newer airframes and tend to appear on the busier routes. The two A321 ceos differ by a single seat, so the practical distinctions across the fleet come down to cabin length, where the exits fall and how far back the rear galley sits.

Business on Aegean is the classic European convertible product: the front rows behind a movable curtain, sold with the middle seat kept empty, better catering and priority handling, on exactly the seat economy gets. It buys an empty middle and a position near the door, not a different chair, and on a two-hour sector that is often precisely what is worth paying for.

Economy behind the curtain is uniform three-by-three, and Aegean keeps it tidy: consistent rows, marked legroom positions at the exits, and a numbering system that skips row 13 entirely, so no one has to sit in it and no one ever has. The rear rows share their space with the galley and the lavatory queue, standard arithmetic on any single-aisle Airbus.

If you buy a business fare, the front row carries the bulkhead trade-offs: the tray lives in the armrest, bags go overhead for take-off, and the forward galley works directly ahead. A row or two back gets the same empty middle without the caveats.

In economy the exit rows are the prize and they go early, though on most fits they give up some recline for the clear doorway; where a marked legroom row sits just behind the exits, that row keeps its full seat. On the A321s a couple of exit-area window seats come with a door box at their feet or a wall where the window should be. The far rear queues for the lavatories and leaves the aircraft last; if the fare difference is small, spend it on sitting forward of the wing.